The ABA had published this book, Shakespeare for Lawyers, so you can find the perfect quote for your next appellate brief or legislative committee hearing. If you're an ABA member, you get a discount on the price. And just for the record, Shakespeare is popularly misunderstood on his "first kill all the lawyers" line. The full line explains that if we want anarchy to reign, the first thing to do is to kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare frequently expressed appreciation for the rule of law (quite understandable given the religious strife of his time) and many of his quotable lines to that effect are in this book.

A recent study shows that approximately half of all college students turn to Wikipedia for course-related research projects. Most of those students use it at either the beginning, or towards the end, of their research trail. The Law Librarian Blog has a nice pie-chart illustrating the different ways students make use of Wikipedia in connection with their research projects.

As we've previously reported, courts are beginning to grapple with whether Wikipedia entries are admissible in court. In this case, a Texas court refused to take judicial notice of a Wikipedia entry reasoning that the online resource is "inherently too unreliable" because anyone can create or revise a post.

This article is by Professor Chad Flanders of St. Louis University School of Law and can be found at 62. Okla L. Rev. 55 (2009). From the abstract:

As a court attaches some weight to any of the matters herein described as of imperative authority or of persuasive authority or of quasi-authority, and as a court has it in its power to disregard even imperative authority, the question naturally arises whether the attempted distinctions between the kinds of authority are not wholly imaginary, or at least unimportant.

In the ongoing-and by now increasingly tired-debate over foreign authority, little attention, if any at all, has been paid to the idea of persuasive authority. This is puzzling because so much in that debate seems, if only implicitly, to rely on assumptions about what persuasive authority is. Those who favor citing to decisions in foreign courts will often defend the practice by pointing to the established practice of citing authorities that are "merely persuasive." The idea that some authority is "persuasive" is then contrasted with authorities that are mandatory or binding and which have their authority by virtue of something else besides their persuasiveness-for example, because they are the rulings of a higher court or are decisions made by the same court in the past. Foreign authorities, the argument goes, are merely "persuasive" and are not binding and as such can be cited insofar as they are helpful and illuminating to the issue. Because they do not bind, they do not raise the specter of being ruled by a foreign country, as some fear.

But very little has been said to explicate the very idea of persuasive authority itself, in its own right: Why indeed should there be any such thing? Why shouldn't there simply be the authority of higher courts and the court's past opinions, plus the court's own reasoning and interpretation? Further, what entitles a source-whether it be a decision of a foreign court, a blog entry, a law review article, or a treatise-to count as a persuasive authority? Are some sources, either by virtue of their merit or their status as a kind of source, generally more persuasive than others? The obviousness of these questions, coupled with the lack of any clear answers to them-still less any theory that might generate answers to them-shows the extent to which we are still in the dark as to the nature of persuasive authority.

This article is authored by Alexandra Braun, a Teaching Fellow of Law at Oxford, and can be found at 58 Am. J. Comp. L. 27 (2010). From the abstract:

Until recently English judgments were characterized by a dearth of references to academic legal writing. This is often ascribed to the existence of a professional convention preventing judges and counsel from citing living authors. While there is generally no doubt that such a convention did exist, it is not certain whether and to what extent it actually involved and affected legal academics and their role within the English legal system. This Article examines the claims that have been made about the genesis and the nature of the convention and attempts to shed light on the true reasons for its emergence, as well as its impact on the status of legal writing in England and the relationship between judges and legal academics.

Unpublished opinions are withheld from the official reports and traditionally treated as not having any precedential effect. But [Los Angeles federal district court Judge Howard] Matz's request referencing databases is out of the ordinary, according to David Cleveland, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad Law Center.

He points out that the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure were recently amended to bar courts from prohibiting or restricting citation to newly issued unpublished opinions. He also notes the E-Government Act of 2002 requiring courts to make available all written opinions on their websites.

Since others can still disseminate Matz’s orders, the request is impractical, Cleveland says. It’s also inappropriate to try to create a secret body of law, he says.

Cleveland argues that litigants ought to be able to point out a court’s prior decisions even if they aren’t binding precedent. He sees a potential due process or equal protection violation if litigants aren’t allowed to ask a court to act today as it did in the past or to explain the distinction.

Cleveland doubts that Westlaw or Lexis will comply with the judge’s request. He appears to be right. The ABA Journal turned up 15 cases in which Westlaw apparently ignored Matz and published his unpublished orders in its electronic database. In each case, Matz’s unfulfilled request was printed at the bottom of the document.

The Legal Writing Institute Conference will be held this summer at Marco Island, Florida from June 27-30, 2010. Although most attendees will likely be flying into Ft. Meyers, there are a number of other airports you can use. Click here to read our post on travel options (and when you are at that post, check out the helpful comments posted there).

I am writing in response to the opinion piece written by three
students which appeared in The Daily Texan on March 4 under the title,
“Law students need a practical education.”
A little more than halfway through their first year of law school, the
authors of this call for practicality have not yet confronted the law
school’s extraordinary array of courses, ranging from Admiralty Law to
Wind Power Law.

In between are dozens upon dozens of courses of undeniable
practicality in topics such as complex litigation, intellectual
property, family law, innovation and entrepreneurship, tax, trusts and
estates.

Nor have the authors encountered our legal clinics (educational
programs in which students deal with the real problems of real clients),
our Advocacy Program or our clerkship and fellowship programs. We have
17 clinics ranging in areas including criminal law, environmental law,
transnational worker rights, children’s rights, national security,
community development, legislative lawyering, domestic violence,
immigration law and Supreme Court litigation.

Our Capital Punishment Clinic had four cases pending in the Supreme
Court in a single recent term and won all four. More than half of UT
Law’s students take at least one clinic, and their experiences are
remarkably intense, rewarding and exquisitely practical.

Terry Tottenham, the president-elect of the State Bar of Texas, took
umbrage at The Daily Texan piece; he has taught all phases of litigation
to our students for the last 20 years and is only one of 41 adjuncts
presently teaching in the Advocacy Program. Hundreds of students
participate in the program each year, and many more participate in
various interscholastic advocacy competitions.

You can read the remainder of the Dean Sager's remarks, as well as those left by the commenters, here. Above the Law has more commentary and coverage here.

The
wildly popular "how-to" guide for successfully placing scholarly
publications
written by UMKC School of Law Professors Nancy Levit and Alan Rostron
has been
recently updated and is available here on SSRN. From the abstract:

This
document contains information about submitting articles to law reviews
and
journals, including the methods for submitting an article, any special
formatting requirements, how to contact them to request an expedited
review,
and how to contact them to withdraw an article from consideration. It
covers
195 law reviews. The document was fully updated in March of 2010.

An earlier version had more than 5,600 abstract views and 2,300 downloads, so you know they're
doing
something right.